“Thanks, buddy,” said McPhail. “Patterson’s got some information on your boy, Akash.”
Patterson slid onto the stool next to Calvino.
“What have you got for me, Patterson?”
“First, I heard he’s not Indian.”
“He’s not Norwegian,” said McPhail from the other side of Calvino.
“I never said that.”
“Why would anyone fake being an Indian in Bangkok?” asked McPhail.
“McPhail, you are a fucking redneck,” said Patterson.
“Thanks, buddy. I love you, too. So does Vinny.”
Calvino eyed his Jack Daniel’s and slowly raised it and drank.
“What have you heard, Patterson?”
“The guy who sells nuts on the soi is a Rohingya. He’s from the same tribe as the ones the Burmese are slaughtering. He’s probably a member of their top one percent. That’s from selling a few bags of nuts each night.”
“Get out of here,” said McPhail.
“His papers say he’s Indian,” said Calvino.
Patterson laughed.
“His papers! His fucking papers are fake.”
“What else have you heard?”
Patterson leaned in close and murmured into Calvino’s ear. McPhail strained to listen on the other side, but the noise from the punters and girls on the soi made that impossible.
“He’s involved in some kind of underground illegal migrant smuggling ring. Like those asshole Northern abolitionists in the US who helped escaped slaves cross the border into Canada.”
“Akash has been smuggling Rohingya?”
“He’s in competition with local fishing boats, factories and rubber plantations, who are in the business of increasing the profit margin by using unpaid labor. I hear he’s found a way to get them out of the country. Malaysia, Indonesia, the places where Muslims are running things.”
“Smuggling?” asked McPhail, hearing a fragment of what Patterson said.
Calvino thought the chances of a Soi Cowboy nut vendor from India or Burma running any kind of successful smuggling operation were about as likely as converting a steam engine into a 3-D printer.
“You sure about this?” asked Calvino.
“If you don’t believe me, ask him,” said Patterson. “Maybe he killed that girl because she was going to turn him in.”
“Why would she do that?” asked Calvino.
“Mama might have called and said he had no choice but to do what Mama asked.”
Calvino called the waitress over and ordered a Johnnie Walker Black for Patterson.
“What else have you got for me?”
“Calvino, has anyone told you that sometimes you sound like a bargirl?”
Calvino rattled the ice in his glass and then raised it to Patterson.
“Mainly to people who sound just like bar owners.”
In the neon jungle what you want and what you get depends on opportunity, luck, timing, a good story and lots of cash. Another group of farang wildebeest were pulled inside the bar by determined hostesses. The three men watched them struggle like astronauts sucked through a ventilation hatch into the vacuum of deep space.
Patterson picked up his drink and drifted back into the bar, saying, “I’ve got to take care of these guys.”
He let the curtain drop behind him as he followed the last customer inside.
McPhail lit a cigarette only to have a water gun turn it into a soggy mess.
“You got what you needed from Patterson?”
He stared at the transformation of his cigarette into a smudge of wet paper and clumps of wet tobacco. He threw it in the street, but it mostly stuck to his hand, which he wiped on the side of his jeans.
“He said Akash isn’t who we think he is,” Calvino said.
Judging how McPhail had handled the vandalism of his cigarette, Calvino judged that his friend was drunk. He’d been losing his humor the last half hour.
“Not who we think he is? Well, that makes him fit right into this place. What’s your guy doing? Smuggling illegals? Is he selling dope? Children?”
“Patterson says he’s involved with shipping Rohingya out of Thailand.”
“Akash may sell nuts, but Patterson is fucking nuts. That skinny little Indian guy couldn’t smuggle a soi dog off the street without getting caught.”
McPhail was a good judge of character, but seven gin and tonics hadn’t exactly put him at his best judging self. Calvino squeezed McPhail’s shoulder.
“You know what’s nuts? Someone firebombed a Burmese refugee camp in Mae Hong Son. Jane Doe came from that camp. She has a name, Ed: Ploy. She had a family. Except for a sister, they’re dead as of yesterday.”
McPhail beamed.
“At least you’ve got a name. You know where she’s from.”
“That’s all I have.”
“What you’ve got is a Rohingya who is a human smuggler for a client. If the dead girl is Burmese, man, they’re going to throw the book at him. It starts to look like some kind of political shit.”
“The cops have already done that.”
“Then get ready for them to throw the rest of the library at him.”
A customer staggered out of the bar with red paint dripping from his head and neck. At first it looked like blood. McPhail reached out and touched the wet red ooze and smelled it.
“Paint? What happened to you?” asked McPhail. “Are you some kind of painter who’s been in an accident?”
“Ed, don’t you recognize me?”
“Andy? What the fuck happened to your head?”
“I got caught in the cross fire of a couple of katoeys in the toilet. Then someone walked in with a bucket of paint. He threw it at one of the katoeys, who jumped out of the way. And as you can see, I didn’t get out of the way.”
“Do you mind if I take a photo?”
“Why?” asked Andy.
“I want to post it on Facebook.”
He snapped several photos of Andy.
When McPhail turned back, Calvino had left. He looked down the street for him. First he scanned the foot traffic heading toward the Asoke end. No Calvino. He turned to look at the crowd throwing water at the Soi 23 end. Calvino had vanished. The street quickly became a battlefield again, the water gun combatants circling, jumping and running battles, and soon the battles got real personal. He looked through the photos of Andy. It had been a good night on the soi.
SEVENTEEN
CALVINO STOOD AT the Indian tailor’s shop near the Nana end of Sukhumvit, realizing he’d walked past his destination. For many years the landmark for the Check Inn 99 Club had been a dwarf in a red vest. He’d vanished a few years ago. Calvino retraced his steps winding his way through a parade of women in burka pushing strollers behind men in white thawbs until he stopped at the long entryway. No dwarf. Just a sign that said “Check Inn 99.” Entering the passage, he walked past the large, old-fashioned globes hanging from the ceiling and the walls. The muffled sound of a saxophone drifted in from the door ahead of him.
Calvino’s impressions paralleled those of Darwin on the Galapagos Islands: “The black rocks heated by the rays of the vertical sun, like a stove, give to the air a close and sultry feeling. The plants also smell unpleasantly,” and marine iguanas were “hideous-looking creatures, of a dirty black color, stupid and sluggish in their movements.”
Instead of black rocks, the place had wicker chairs and tables and a stage, a couple of stools and speakers and sound equipment preserved from another age. It was mid-Sunday afternoon, and Colonel Pratt stood on the stage playing a mournful Dexter Gordon take on “Our Man in Paris,” accompanied by a black guitar player named Billy Clarke, a grandfather who’d lived in Paris most of his life. (Later Calvino learned that Clarke had once played with Gordon there some thirty years before. During a break Gordon had told him that his grandfather on his mother’s side had won the Medal of Honor for fighting in the Spanish-American War. He’d been proud of that, not that it had changed the life of a black man livin
g in America.)
One iguana-like customer sat in the back, drinking double shots of rum, his red-rimmed eyes staring into empty space. There were no other customers. Calvino sat at a table near the stage, doubling the size of the audience. Colonel Pratt nodded toward him, and Billy reacted with a smile suggesting that things were looking up. “Hey, Vincent, welcome,” said Billy from the stage, picking his guitar. “We’ve got one more Dexter Gordon tune, and then we’re taking a break.” Colonel Pratt never missed a beat, eyes half-closed as he worked the keys on the gold-plated saxophone, his cheeks puffed out, swaying his head, his lips on the mouthpiece.
After they finished, Calvino applauded. The iguana in the back sat quietly, lidless eyes staring ahead in the dim light. Billy Clarke and Colonel Pratt came to Calvino’s table and sat down.
“The audience picks up later in the afternoon,” said Billy.
“Glad you could make it,” said Colonel Pratt.
At the same time he’d been surprised to see Calvino walk in. Stay away from jazz clubs, his doctor had recommended. Mya and Rob had been members of a jazz band called Monkey Nose. The idea was to break the associations with Mya. Live jazz joints ranked high on his list of hallucination inducers.
But Calvino felt nothing strange there. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. “You pinch the devil before he pinches you,” his father had told him when he was a kid.
Playing to an empty club, Calvino knew, isn’t a performer’s worst nightmare. Not playing at all always retains the top spot on the nightmare list. For the Colonel, the absence of an audience was a reminder that since he’d had returned from his assignment in Burma, his career both at the police department and on the musical stage had plummeted into a void as deep as the Mariana Trench. He couldn’t have stopped his colleagues from working over Calvino if he’d tried. They’d damaged Calvino partly just to show the Colonel that they could.
The fact was, Colonel Pratt couldn’t draw an audience for a Sunday afternoon jazz session. His name wasn’t big enough. Inside the professional zone where his name once carried weight, it no longer worked the old magic. The anonymous and the ostracized share the same fate—the loss of respect, authority and place. A wall of silence separated him from his colleagues and friends. The Check Inn 99 Club with Billy on Sunday afternoons was one of the few places that Colonel Pratt the musician had left.
“Maybe you two have some business,” said Billy. “Besides, I need to take a piss.”
Billy left them at the table.
“I need to talk with Akash again,” Calvino said.
“That’s difficult,” said Colonel Pratt.
Calvino knew that when a Thai says “difficult,” he usually means impossible.
“He’s got a right to legal counsel.”
“He does. But that right doesn’t include a farang ex-lawyer.”
Calvino saw that that line of reasoning was leading in the wrong direction and shifted his approach.
“What if I told you that Jane Doe has a name? Ploy. She’s Burmese.”
Colonel Pratt straightened up in his chair.
“Burmese? Are you sure about this information?”
Calvino smiled.
“Yeah, eighty percent.”
“Why not a hundred percent?”
“Because that’s not the world we live in.”
At eighty percent, he’d passed along to Colonel Pratt information that would give him a lot of face inside the department. No one had a clue to Jane Doe’s identity, and working Akash over hadn’t produced any useful information. Either he was as tough as one of those Indians who walks over hot coals to lie on a bed of nails, or he didn’t know her name.
“I can’t give you my source,” said Calvino. “Not yet. First, I need to talk to Akash. ”
Wheels turned behind Colonel Pratt’s eyes as he stared at Calvino.
“Ploy’s not a Burmese name,” he said. “You’re saying the dead girl is Burmese and not Thai?”
Calvino leaned over the table.
“Pratt, I’m saying that all Akash has between him and a one-way ticket to death row is evidence that someone else was involved,” replied Calvino. “He didn’t kill her. Let me talk to him again.”
“‘Nature teaches beasts to know their friends,’” said Colonel Pratt, quoting Coriolanus. “Are human beings less teachable?”
The wheels turning inside the Colonel’s head had turned up the Shakespeare quote he’d been searching for. It also left him with the existential question he’d been working out as he played the Dexter Gordon piece when Calvino had walked in.
“I don’t know, Pratt. We have some unfinished karma to work through on the Burma connection. Why don’t we get it done? So we can both move on.”
EIGHTEEN
AN OVERHEAD FAN, its blades black with grime, slowly beat the air like the wings of an ancient flying reptile. The corridors stank of sweat, urine and shit. Men’s voices reverberated at a low level, with the frequent spike of a cry, a shout, a cough or a threat registering above it. A mosquito with drone-like stealth landed on Calvino’s cheek. He slapped it dead and removed his hand, now streaked with a crooked red jag of his own blood. Seated across from him was Akash, skinny, dark, with sharp features, his mustache glistening with a thin sheen of sweat. His eyes burned a fiery brown adrift in a red sea. The previous day Akash had heard the news of the death sentence handed down to four Indians convicted of raping and murdering an Indian woman. The message had sunk in that cultural currents were rapidly weaving a noose around his own neck.
“Who are you, Akash?”
Calvino looked straight at Akash, seated on a plastic stool on the other side of a mesh screen. He looked confused, dazed.
“But I don’t understand, Mr. Calvino. You know me. I am Akash.”
“Your name isn’t Akash Saru.”
A bead of sweat hung from the end of Akash’s nose and dropped onto the back of his hand. The whole time Akash worked his jaw, moving his head from side to side as if it were no longer attached to his spine.
“The girl you found dead was Burmese. I think you knew her. You’d arranged to meet her. Then what? You found her dead?”
Calvino let him absorb the implications of what he was saying. Akash twitched his nose, ran his hand across his mustache. He looked at the floor.
“Look at me, Akash. You’re not Indian. You’re from Burma. You’re going to tell me the story of why you went to the Tobacco Monopoly Land to meet her. You weren’t living there. That was a lie. No way you could pull that off. A dark-skinned Burmese, the Thais would spot you. Remember, if you want to get out of here, you need to help me. Start by telling me your real name. Then I want to hear why you went to meet Mi Swe. Or maybe you knew her by her Thai name, Ploy.”
Akash looked like a sailor trapped in a submarine as depth charges above his head exploded ever closer. He sat back, arms crossed. Sweat rolled down his face, pooling on his chin before dripping on the floor. He rolled his head one way, then another, checking who was near him and behind him. A CCTV camera recorded the inmate’s position from a perch on the far concrete wall. No attempt was made to disguise it. Inside prison the inmates understood they had utterly surrendered all rights to dignity, privacy or security. He was basically fucked, knowing that no position was comfortable; some were just less uncomfortable than others. And he had to choose one. Some tiny fragment of pride or fear held him in silence.
Calvino was on his feet.
“You don’t want to talk. Fine. Whoever you are, you’re on your own, and good luck.”
He slipped the Bangkok Post across to him, with its front-page coverage of the four Indians sentenced to be hanged for rape and murder.
“Have a read, Akash. This will be your story if you don’t tell me the truth.”
“Deen Alam,” he said. “That’s my name.”
Calvino sat back in the chair. The prisoner, who could not have been more than five-six when standing, strained himself not to fall apart. Calvino wondered how
it was that he had not seen before that this man was a Rohingya, not an Indian. Probably it was for the same reason the cops had accepted the forged papers; no one looked beyond the surface appearance. Reality was a series of sideward glances. Selling counterfeit Indian documents wasn’t hard for locals to make a reasonable living from, made easier by the fact that a large number of Indian documents were counterfeit to begin with. In skin tone, India had the full color chart from white to black. There was a caricature Indian, but people had long ago stopped confusing that with the range of Indians they saw on the streets in Bangkok.
“I am a Rohingya. I fled the attacks inside Rakhine State. It’s in Myanmar. ”
“I know where Rakhine State is, Deen.”
Calling him by his real name for the first time changed a lot of things for Calvino. He was no longer the Indian, but a Muslim who’d survived a pogrom and escaped to Thailand. He’d been a lucky man. The odds of a Rohingya not getting caught and locked up in a refugee hellhole of a camp seemed about the same as the chances of landing a single-engine airplane on the moon.
“Are there others like you in Bangkok?” asked Calvino.
“You read the papers. Many have escaped from detention. Yes, there are others like me.”
Rohingya like him migrated with phony identity papers and bribes. He watched his client’s eyes dip to the floor in time to see a large rat walk past—not run but walk, as if he owned the place.
“Ploy. The girl you were supposed to meet. Tell me about her.”
Deen Alam started slowly.
“She was Karen. A Christian. I was told she wanted to leave Thailand and needed help.”
“Who told you to help Ploy?”
The Rohingya shrugged.
“I don’t have a name.”
When he saw Calvino’s expression, Deen Alam shifted on his chair.
“It was Lek, Nit or Noi. Something like that. I don’t remember.”
Calvino’s suspicion increased. Deen Alam, or Akash—the pseudonym was the one that stuck in Calvino’s mind—was evasive, his eyes giving him away each time he lied.
“You told this person that you could help Ploy? Isn’t it strange that a Burmese Karen would ask a Rohingya for help? It sounds like a bullshit story.”
The Marriage Tree Page 12